Coffee connection

Bunny and I love coffee in its many avatars. There’s South India’s kapi, made of milk-infused decoction, served steaming hot and poured by the yard to cool it.When we visit Italy, the Mecca of mocha, we have cappuccino, but only till 11am, after which it’s deemed uncivilised to drink something so milky. So we switch to the macchiato, a shot of concentrated espresso with a spot of milk to ‘stain’ it.On our visits to cities like Turin, we have become familiar faces in the city’s many cafes and the wait staff recite our order for due cappuccini before we can say it.Unlike Italy, where decaffeinated coffee, deca, is widely available, Gurgaon has few places serving decaf, which Bunny drinks, being allergic to caffeine.This paucity of decaf is a blessing in a way, as the frequency of our visits to only a few coffee shops has made us regulars who are warmly greeted not just by the baristas, but also by other customers whose names we don’t know but with whom greetings are exchanged as with old friends.Conversation was, and still is, the staple fare of the famed Coffee House of Calcutta, located close to The Statesman building where I worked. The speciality was the ‘double half’, a cup of coffee split into two by pouring half a cupful into the saucer for a companion, thus halving the cost of the conversational adda, Calcutta’s celebrated pastime.Coffee houses became popular in Europe and England in the 17th century as meeting places for not just conversation but for conducting business, in time giving birth to banks and insurance syndicates like Lloyd’s of London, which was formed in Edward’s Coffee House in 1688.The word bank comes from the Italian banca, the bank or table where business was conducted. And if your business went bust, your bank was publicly broken, banca rotta, from which we get ‘bankrupt’.Coffee has a tradition of both commerce and conversation. And if you do a friendly double-half you’ll avoid bankruptcy.Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author's own.